Tips to Protect Your Car This Winter

With clear, crisp days and snowy nights, winter can be a beautiful time of year, but it still comes with its own challenges. This season has the potential to wreak havoc on your car, and not just when you’re actively driving in snowy or icy conditions. If you live in an area that gets any amount of cold weather during the winter, it’s important to know about certain precautions that can help to keep your car in good condition! Here are a few to be aware of.

Don’t Drive Behind Spreaders

Trucks that spread a fine layer of sand, rock salt, and other deicing products on the road surface are a common sight at this time of year. This is an absolute necessity before a snowstorm or cold snap to help keep the roads safe and prevent ice from forming, but these trucks can also present a hazard for your car! 

Whenever possible, avoid driving directly behind a spreader truck, even one that isn’t actively laying down salt. You never know when the spreader might activate, and the flying pieces of rock salt can ding your car or chip your windshield.

Remove Salt from Your Car

Even when you make the effort to avoid deicers that are being laid down on the road, it’s still inevitable that these chemicals will wind up splattered on your car over the course of the season. The crust of salt that can accumulate on your vehicle during the winter isn’t just unsightly– it’s also dangerous to the structural integrity of your car. 

Road salt and deicing products can be corrosive, eating away at your paint job and your undercarriage and weakening your car’s defenses to the elements. To keep this effect at bay, try to clean your car throughout the season and avoid letting salt sit on the surface for too long. Just make sure to choose warmer days to wash your vehicle so that your doors don’t freeze shut!

Lift Your Wiper Blades

No one likes clearing snow and ice off their car after a storm, but this situation can go from bad to worse if you’re unlucky enough to break a windshield wiper in the process. Your wipers can become frozen to your windshield during a bout of snow, and as you try to chip away the ice before heading to work in the morning, it’s easy for a wiper blade to be broken. 

To prevent this, try to get in the habit of lifting your wipers up off the windshield each time you park your car for an extended period of time, even if you aren’t sure it’s going to snow. This will protect them, and make it easier to clear your windshield later on!

Keeping your car in good condition throughout the winter can be much easier with these helpful tips, and with a reliable service center to help you! If your vehicle is due for a service, make sure to contact us at Keller Brothers Ford today.